I’ve been looking into a minor debate going around the higher-ed legislative circles: whether the state should spend its limited higher-ed construction money on new labs and buildings, or on maintaining and renovating the buildings it already has.

Sounds about as interesting as a rusty pipe.

But it’s actually turning into a lively debate about priorities, preparing for the future and the burden it could put on students. And it hasn’t been too partisan — rather a debate among DFLers, judging from statements at last week’s House higher-ed committee hearing.

Some politicians, such as Rep. Terry Morrow (DFL-St. Peter), have stressed the need to do a combination of both. (He told me later we really should be doing a lot more of both, and hopes the debate highlights the need.)

Concentrating only on the long list of maintenance projects, he says, will only put Minnesota colleges and universities out of date technologically. Students need to learn in modern labs, workshops and other facilities if they’re going to make it in the job market, he stresses.

But two-year-student leaders have a different slogan: “Fix it first.”

They said in last week’s Senate hearing that maintaining buildings costs them nothing, because the state pays for it. Colleges pay part of the cost of new ones, however, and usually transfer part of that cost to students in the form of higher tuition, they say.

Most adamant on the whole subject was Rep. Gene Pelowski (DFL-Winona), a guy who always seems up for a fight.

He said avoiding critical maintenance failures is Job #1, and wanted officials from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system to give pols a prioritized list of the most critical projects in the system.

He recalled difficulties that Winona State University had in getting maintenance for its boilers under the Jesse Ventura administration — boilers that were apparently at a crisis point:

“A new building is great. You get the groundbreaking and you get the pictures, and you get the shovel. If your boilers fail, that building isn’t heated or cooled, and in Winona’s case, if they failed in the winter and the water was in those basements and froze, you would have no building on campus that didn’t need to be replaced. … I don’t think any campus should come to us with a new building unless they have everything repaired that is on that campus first.”

About the blogger

Alex Friedrich reports on higher education issues for MPR News. Among the stories he has covered: the fall of the Berlin Wall, aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, 2003 Moscow suicide bombing and 2004 presidential elections in the Republic of Georgia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia and a master’s in European political economy from the London School of Economics.

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But if we had less new buildings, how would we have enough to put the names of all of our administrators on them?

A commonly used strategy at the U of M is to neglect a building long enough so that an administrator can say – with an attempt at a straight face – see, it is in such bad condition that it isn’t worth fixing.

Why is it that at some of the great European universities, that the Bruininks administration wanted to emulate, some of the buildings are hundreds of years old?